


the day her line went flat

by aparticularbandit



Series: it's love's illusions i recall; i really don't know love at all [1]
Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-27 23:54:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19800406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: i have no summary for this.





	the day her line went flat

she was there the day her line went flat.

it was dark. it was _always_ dark when she visited. their relationship had always been a secret, until it wasn’t, so it only felt right to keep visiting her in the dark, when everyone who said they loved her was asleep and wouldn’t need to know. then there wouldn’t be questions, endless questions, about _why_ she was there and whether or not she still loved her and glances full of judgement and the weight of their damnation resting on her shoulders. she’d had enough of that for one lifetime by now.

it wasn’t even compassion or love that brought her here the first time. something about _emergency contact_ and she’d been alone and hadn’t wanted to come but—

she’d been the only one they’d been able to contact.

maybe it was a mixture of pity and anger, then. she’d stormed through the doors to her room with _rose, you can’t keep jumping back into my life like this_ on her lips, and then she’d seen her. she’d looked so small for someone that had been so big. the words had been gone before she’d had the chance to say anything else, stolen from her, and she’d sat in the chair next to her bed, and taken her still hand in both of hers – they’d taken her ring, or maybe she just wasn’t wearing it anymore – and looked at the cascade of curls lying against the pillow and the face that had only ever looked this serene when she was asleep and let out a sigh and—

she’d thought she’d been done, but she would never really be done with rose.

it was a gunshot, she thought. something that hit just right. the doctors had spent too much time debating – _this was sin rostro, wouldn’t it be moral to just leave her?_ – but personal morals and ethics shouldn’t be debated on the operating table and there she was. not quite alive and not quite dead. clinging on to…something.

luisa didn’t know what there was left for her to cling so hard to. maybe she just didn’t know how to let go.

and somehow luisa had kept coming back.

at first, she didn’t know why, but then she realized it was a lot easier to talk to rose when she couldn’t say anything back. she didn’t have to worry about any subtle – or _not_ so subtle, neither of them had been very good at that – change of topic from the matter at hand to…sex. most of the time it was sex. rose had a very physical charisma to her that luisa had never been able to resist, and she didn’t need to now.

 _i don’t even know why i’m here_ , she said, and she could hear rose, _you’re here because you love me and you always have._

_i don’t love you, rose. i love what you were supposed to be. i loved that you loved me except that you didn’t._

_i may never stop loving you._

she befriended rose’s nurse. or maybe it was that she was just always there, and the nurse would leave her a cup of water and pat her back. luisa knew enough to remember how to move rose – patients in bedrest who couldn’t move themselves needed to be turned, needed to be bathed, needed to have so many things done for them that they couldn’t do themselves. eventually, luisa helped. it wasn’t her job – the nurse told her as much – but a part of her felt it should have been, although she couldn’t say why.

no one noticed her growing more silent over the past few months. no – petra did, once, and she thought that was more a nod from the new jane than it was from petra herself. it was easier to be quiet around her extended family when all of her words were spent talking to a body lying in a coma like an audio journal.

so it wasn’t petra she told. it was the new jane, finally, who coaxed it out of her. sometimes it seemed like everybody in her family had a jane other than her, and it was petra’s jane who seemed to like her the most, probably because she was the only one in the entire family whose life she hadn’t hurt or twisted or ruined in some form or other. there was no guilt with her.

and jane looked over at petra and looked back and nodded. she mentioned a place for extended care, if luisa wanted it. she said she didn’t. she knew she shouldn’t. she looked into it anyway, and she paid for it with one of the accounts that used to be rose’s. that felt a little bit justifiable. it would still be tracked to her, if anyone cared to check.

but no one ever really did.

she didn’t know why she continued to visit, except that talking to rose felt familiar and right. maybe she talked to rose like someone talked with a priest, or she talked with her the way some people prayed, or she talked with her the way she used to talk with her imaginary friend, carla. it wasn’t as though she believed rose could _hear_ her.

and it wasn’t as though she thought rose would ever wake up. not after so many months. not with her brain activity continuing on unchanging. not with sitting and watching and sometimes, maybe, she wished. she wasn’t even sure how she would react, seeing those childish blue eyes or the childish bright grin. she’d cry, maybe.

it wasn’t hard, investing all this time into rose. if you watered roses and trimmed them and took care of them, the bushes would grow and grow. sometimes they would anyway, deep and wild, but then they were just as much weeds as they were flowers. she knew a little bit about that. but you could only invest so much time in a cut rose before it faded away into nothing. the best way to keep it would be to press it between pages like a scrapbook, but—

she didn’t call the nurse when rose’s line went flat. there was no need to. she knew that rose had chosen to leave while she was there. she told herself that. she didn’t know why rose chose that particular moment. she certainly wouldn’t have chosen it herself, not for rose. there was nothing spectacular about it – no fireworks, no lightning, nothing. just a quiet acceptance and moving on, something rose had never once done in all of her life.

she didn’t cry. the nurse held a hand to her shoulder and she didn’t cry.

she did later, when she thought about how there wouldn’t be a funeral because no one knew she was still alive and no one would think well of her for having a funeral for a woman she’d been spending money keeping alive without saying anything who she wasn’t supposed to be in love with, when she realized that rose wouldn’t have wanted a grave because the only thing it would get would be spit and rocks and salt and people who danced and celebrated her final journey.

she put rose in the tomb that was supposed to be her mother’s. it was empty, after all. it only felt right for rose to be there.


End file.
